"The Templars of Ancient Mexico": A Study in Racism and Sexism in the Creation of Fringe History
8/12/2016
I have now finished translating Eugène Beauvois’s 1902 article on “
The Templars of Ancient Mexico and Their European Origins,” and I have to say that it surprised even me, both in the scope of its ridiculous claims and the extremely close resemblance it bears to modern Templar conspiracy theories. It’s not the most elegant translation I’ve ever done, but it gets the point across. I omitted the excessively long footnotes, both because I kind of got bored by the end of the translation and also because, aside from the primary source references, they were often directing readers to Beauvois’s own earlier work, or to other outdated fringe claims. Perhaps someday when I have more time I’ll add them in, but I doubt it.
It turns out that Beauvois, an archaeologist specializing in Nordic and pre-Columbian cultures, was a prolific fringe historian, producing dozens of articles alleging all manner of European incursions into America. He wrote of the Welsh in North America, of the Celts in Mexico, and of the Vikings in America. He endorsed the Zeno manuscript hoax, too. He began innocently enough in 1859, at age 24, with the (correct) conclusion that the Icelandic sagas recorded a memory of the Vikings discovering what is now North America. But from this he drew an incorrect conclusion. Unable to conceive of Native Americans as real humans with their own cultures, he assumed that the overwhelming moral force of Christianity and the intellectual superiority of European Man led the Natives to immediately adopt European culture. He went on to suggest that the path followed by the Vikings was the route that the Irish and eventually the Knights Templar eventually took from Europe to America, landing in the north and walking south in Mexico, guided by the tribes they evangelized.
This argument came to its fruition in an 1897 article whose title we can translate as “Traces of the Influence of Europeans on the Pre-Columbian Languages, Science, and Industries of Mexico and Central America,” an article that the
Journal of American Folk-Loredismissed as being “of doubtful value.” His argument was that passages in Plutarch referring to the island of Ogygia where the Celts say Kronos lies sleeping (
De Defectu Oraculorum 18 and
De Faciae 27) actually refer to Mexico, thus proving that the Celts had been in contact with Mexico since Antiquity. Of course for the sequel the proud Frenchman would need to prove that the French had outdone these old Irishmen.
In the 1902 article, acceptance of his earlier argument is taken for a given, and he refers to it many times. As I have previously described, in the article he assumes that the title of the nation of Native Mexicans who served in the temple of Tezcatlipoca, the Tecpantlacs, refer to the Knights Templar because the word means “people of the palace-temple,” which he compares to the name of the Templars, the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, with the addition of claiming that the Temple of Solomon doesn’t refer to the actual Temple but rather to the basilica beside the old temple grounds where the Knights made their Levantine headquarters. ...
http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/t...-and-sexism-in-the-creation-of-fringe-history